ULTIMATE GUIDE to MASKING in InDesign CC 2019

masking in InDesign is just as important as in Photoshop and illustrator so in this video I'm going to walk you through all the different ways you can show and hide parts of your images I will demonstrate the use of custom frames feathering and clipping paths and show you many creative techniques that can improve your InDesign layouts check out the other two videos in this series if you want to learn more about masking you can find the links in the description below as always if you like the way I explain things and you want to learn more from me make sure to check out our training platform where you can access over 200 hours of premium courses on tools like InDesign use the link in the description below to start your membership now with a three day free trial when someone mentions masking InDesign is not the tool that you would first think of it's more Photoshop and an illustrator but actually in InDesign there's also quite a lot of masking techniques you can do even just simply by working with frames which is the most common thing you would do in InDesign is in a way a masking technique so let me walk you through all of these things that you can do to show and hide details and to work with these techniques in a creative way in Adobe InDesign first of all when you work with frames you need to remember that the frame is your container and the image inside it is the content and they work together but also independently in a way so you can see here on the right side I have my frame and inside it the image and I can drag any of the sides in to crop the image so let's say if I want to crop it closer to the flower it will look like that and then using the content grabber in the middle I can drag the image around within this crop if I wanted to move it around so you can see why I'm referring to the frame itself as a mask because it is showing and hiding certain parts of the image now of course you can use different shapes in InDesign to create your frames even if you have a frame that already rectangular like this one here you can use the frame tools like the ellipse frame tool and draw a circle if you hold down the shift key it will be a perfect circle or an ellipse if you want and once you have that ready you can just select the image itself command or control X to cut it out and then selecting your frame you just have to use command option V or ctrl alt V to paste into that shape so this is still the same principle here we have again the content grabber tool we can move the image around within that frame and even resize if we wanted to so nothing really different apart from the shape of course of the frame and of course you have also the polygon frame tool which works exactly the same way now if you click with that tool what's worth mentioning is that you can type in the amount of sides and you can even create star inset so basically instead of a normal polygon you can have a star so for example a 5 side star if I just type in 50% we will get a perfect star shape which again will act as our frame to be honest I very rarely or even never used a star shape frame in InDesign but it's still worth mentioning and maybe in one of your projects you will find this useful but let me show you a cool technique if you use the frame toad so the normal rectangle frame tool you can do another technique with this as well and just so you can see what I'm doing here I am going to create a separate layer and start drawing my frame so you can see if I press right arrow on the keyboard I can separate my frame or it's called grid if I meaning creating a grid of frames I can use the up arrow also to divide it into rows let's just create maybe something around that much at 7 by 4 frames at this point and I'm just going to let go here so what happened here is that we have a lot of separate frames or a grid of frames and what we can do is to cut the image out from the background just like before I selected and impress c'mon EXO control X now I can select all of these other frames and from the object menu I'm going to choose paths make compound path it's command or control 8 the shortcut for it this is actually the same shortcut in Illustrator as well so it's worth learning it for both applications and what you will see is that once you created that all of these rectangles are now joined so even though they are still independent rectangles which I can select with the direct selection tool and I can move around it's still going to be handled as one compound path and the cool thing about that is if I select all of them together so just click on it now because it's one entity I can use the shortcut command option V or control all three which is the pasted into feature and you will see that the image will be now placed into this grid of frames so that is a really cool option and by the way the pasted into feature is from the Edit menu you can find it there as well and as I said before if I select one of these squares I can move it around even delete one of them if I want to have an empty space for text in this case it would look really cool in a brochure so you can experiment with this feature and see what you can come up with but let me show you with the same image another version if I use the rectangle tool or rectangle faint frame tool and I just draw maybe a frame here I'm going to draw another frame around here and there may be another frame there it could even be more like poetry frame and then maybe let's just have these overlapping as well something like that and I'm just going to rotate them slightly as well why not just add a bit more interest on it like that or so let's rotate this that way now I'm going to select all of these three frames so currently they are just an empty frames and I creating an object style in this document which I'm going to apply to them it's a simple white stroke with a bit of drop shadow on that so that's how they look and even like this it looks interesting but what we've done previously is to cut the image out select one of these frames and use the shortcut pasted into and then repeat it for these other images and all other frames and now we have again a very creative version of the same original composition so in a way I use these frames to highlight the most interesting details of the image and that is still just playing with the rectangular frame so we haven't even used any more advanced techniques but let's crack on and look at another really cool technique that you can do and once again a lot of people wouldn't even think of using tools like the pen tool or the pencil and the smooth tools in InDesign but they are actually there and they work almost exactly the same way as an illustrator I think InDesign inherited these tools from illustrator because InDesign is actually the youngest one out of the three main graphic design tools so Photoshop Illustrator and InDesign this is the one that learned quite a lot from the other three applications but mainly from Illustrator so let's just say I would like to create a cut out of the fact I could use the pen tool of course for that and I'm just going to draw around this lady let's just create an interesting frame here so it's like a fashion cut out when use scissors and you just cut out an image from its background that's basically the effect like that and that isn't already a frame so I can now select the image and paste into here with the same shortcut similarly to before we could also add our object style on it and then we have a cool cutout effect now similarly to this if I just copy the image and paste it and again let's just put it here on the side the one that we created with the pen tool so I'm just going to keep that there but on this other one I'm going to use now instead the pencil tool and with this one I can draw around it again I'm not trying to create a perfect selection but this is going to be a little bit more organic less sharp and edgy selection and here at the bottom let's just close it off something like that I'm going to try to close it but to be honest the easiest way to close it would be to go to the object menu paths and then close path and that closed the endpoint for it now once again we could paste it in here cut the image paste it in and then use again the same frame style on it so the pencil tool is more rounded compared to the pen tool but if you wanted to refine edges on either of these versions you can also use the smooth tool with which you can draw over the edges that you created and just smooth them out basically so have a smoother transition on these sharp corners so just like in Illustrator you can use this tool and if you double click on the smooth tool in the toolbar you get additional options like fidelity and smoothness but let's move on to the next feature which is using typography as your frame or turn text into the frame itself now this is very similar to using clipping masks in Photoshop but in InDesign you actually need to outline your text so you won't be able to keep it editable if you want to have an image inside a word or a sentence or a single character here eyes have this tag still editable and I curled it slightly to have the E and the a joined up together you will see why because I actually have an interesting detail there in the photo behind it but first of all as I said we need to outline this the shortcut for that is command shift o or ctrl shift o but you can also go to the type menu and choose create outlines so once you've done that your text is now made up of paths so each character is turned into an individual path but it is actually held together as a compound path so if I go to the object menu and under the paths options you can see it would say release compound path you can actually separate them into individual shapes but by default when you use the outline option it will create a compound path which means that if I copy this image or cut it out and paste into this section it would immediately place it into all of those characters at the same time so now this word is our custom frame and again if I hover over it I can use the content grabber to move the image around within the text so you can see why I wanted to keep this part here visible and it's actually quite cool the way the two lats as I joined together almost forming like a ligature let's move on there's another thing you can do in InDesign and that is feathering now feathering is again something that's available in Photoshop but here in InDesign you actually have a little bit more options with it first of all a tool that I really like is called gradient feather tool is something you can use when you select an image and let's say you just want to fade out one part of it one side of it you can click and drag and it's going to fade out the other side of the image so if you want to keep let's say the right side visible you just have to do it from that side if you do it in a shorter line than the transition itself will be shorter you can do it diagonally and you can also do it vertically if you want and so on and so forth so this is called gradient feather and with the tool it's very quick and easy to set up but there are other two feathering options as well which you can find from the FX drop-down so if you go here you can see gradient feather is already on and if you want it to be a bit more specific you can also change it here so for example even instead of linear you can use a radial gradient and you can reverse it as well but let's just see what else we have here we have directional feather it's important that you have to make sure you click on the word as well so whichever effect you are using make sure you click on it not just take otherwise you won't see the options on the right so once this is selected and the preview option is on at the bottom you will be able to see how this works basically the directional feather is a similar feature to gradient feather but in this case you can control which side of your frame should be feathered out and you can control them independently of each other or if you click on the little chain here it will apply the same amount of feathering on all the sides and last but not least we also have basic feather which is just a global feathering around all the edges so this is probably the most straightforward one from all of them now you can of course still play around with these other values like noise which can be interesting or you can also use the choke defining again the transition the length of the transition in a way and of course you can also combine multiple feathering if you ever want to do that and these effects I would mainly use to go style images and to have them push back in the background to be able to put some text over it or stuff like that of course you can combine it with reduced opacity as well so you can soften at the edges and then you can soften the image itself as well and that makes it much easier to use it as a background element if you have a need that may be on a brochure but now that you know how to use feathering let's move on to something more exciting and it's called detect edges now I have an image here and I'm just going to move it over the text so you can see that it has a white background it's an isolated photograph so obviously it's been prepared like this but it's a simple jpg file so there's no selections or masks prepared for it but what I'm going to do is to go to the object menu and choose clipping path from there choose options and if I switch to detect edges you will see what it can do it automatically creates a selection for us again it tries to identify the high contrast details and based on that it's going to create the selection using a path now there's a couple of additional options here you can increase the threshold or decrease the threshold in this case the creased threshold is probably better because you can see there were a few details that were lost if I had a higher threshold because it's a completely white background I could go down really low with the threshold and I could further refine it if I wanted to by clicking okay and just use the direct selection tool to move any of these points around so if I come a little bit closer I can select let's say one of these points here and either delete them or move them around so I can move them up and then let's just grab this point here drag it down so similarly how you would work with a vector mask in Photoshop you can do exactly the same thing here within InDesign I wouldn't recommend to spend too much time on parts in InDesign because Photoshop can actually do probably a better job but still when we move this over here you can see it's actually quite nice now the only problem is that I still feel like there's a bit of the original wide details showing up around the edges so for this if we go back to the clipping path options we can increase this feature called inset frame when I increase that up and click OK click away you can see the white gaps are gone now there's still a couple of things that we would need to refine but it's better to do these type of things in Photoshop although InDesign can do it for you if you want to do it quickly without leaving InDesign it's perfectly fine but you can do this better if you use vector and pixel masks in Photoshop but detect edges feature is actually something you can use also for text wrap so not only for cutting out an image from its original background but also for text wrap now that's still something you apply onto your image and this feature you can find from the window menu text wrap panel and within there you can choose this third option which is the wrap around object shape and within here you will find the detect edges option but in case you already use detect edges for your clipping you can just leave it as same as clipping so you wouldn't have to choose the type edges again it's just worth mentioning that it is the same feature that can be applied either for a selection or for text wrap so if I have this option on here and maybe just increase the offset you will see exactly what it does creates an outline based on that path on this image and it makes sure that when you move this image closer to text the text will be pushed away so the outline will make sure that the text wraps around the image so if you already use the attack pages to create a clipping path in InDesign for an image you should also make use of it for a bit of text rabbit of course don't overdo it because these effects can make it difficult to read your copy so just a useful point here if you do this feature it's best to use it with justified text because if it's not justified so let's just say I left align it then both left and right side is going to be really messy while when I go back to justified text at least the right side is completely straight and finally here's a few examples where we can combine the features of Photoshop and InDesign so first of all on the left side I have an image which has a pixel mask saved in it it's actually saved as a channel so if I alter option double click on this image it will open up in Photoshop and I can show you exactly what I created here there is an alpha channel saved so it was a selection that I see it as an alpha Channel so it can also be something that you save as a pixel mask but in this case it's safe healing to the channels and if I come here into InDesign and go to the object clipping path options this is something I will be able to utilize by choosing alpha Channel as simple as that and then of course I have to make sure I choose also the channel which I call the girl so I click on that and then click OK so we have a really nice selection created from the alpha channel or if you have an image which was saved with that path InDesign will also be able to use that so I go through again clipping path options and then choose Photoshop path this time and there's the camera which it found automatically that was the only only path saved and I can click OK and we can see it looks great this was actually a path that we created a the Photoshop masking tutorial if you haven't seen it already make sure you check it out it really covers a lot the link is in the description below so both of these examples here you can see in the tutorial I go through step by step how I created them so my preference when I work with images in InDesign and I want to cut them out is to save a path into them so similarly to a vector mask these are actually saved as a path so again I can show you how this looks there's no layer mask or anything like that but the same thing that we've done in that other video that path or outline is saved as a path and I just simply call it camera so if you use the pen tool and you draw your path you just have to make sure you double click on the name and name it and save it like that the cool thing is that you can even store parts in JPEG files so you don't even have to have a PSD file you can have a smaller file size image but it still can hold parts even multiple parts if you need you can store in one single jpg but here's one last example where I wanted to create something a bit more complicated and I created both a vector mask and a pixel mask in Photoshop so I can just show you how this looks again if I option double click here we will see that for this image if I turn off the photo layer I needed the pixel mask for the hair and the vector mask for the body so again hard edges and soft edges again if you're not familiar with these techniques check out my Photoshop masking video which is part of this mini-series so that's how I created it in one layer having those two mosques creating the cutout and then I have also the original full image underneath so you will see why I created this way and I even named my layer so the one at the bottom it's called photo and the one on the top is called masked so as simple as that but if we come back here into InDesign the reason why I've done it this way is because I can select one of them right click and choose object layer options or you can also find from the object menu if you want and within that you can choose which layers you want to show so if I turn off the photo layer then obviously we will see the masked out version I can then click OK and now I can align these two images to each other so I can drag this over to the other one and let's just put both of them here in the middle now why did I do this what was the point of creating the mask if I then put them on top of each other well what I can do now is to select the full image version and if I drag the top edge down maybe to somewhere around here then we can create these cool out-of-bounds effects and of course we can decide how much of the original image we want to see we can even click on the little yellow square on the right and drag these points in to create more like a rounded shape or even use a round shape there instead of the rectangle so just to combine a little bit the techniques that we have going to undo these changes and use the ellipse frame tool and draw an ellipse let's just say something like that and then I just cut this out select that circular or elliptical frame and paste into so there you go we have a very nice out-of-bounds effect and that is all I wanted to show you in this video so all the different ways of showing and hiding details of images in InDesign but this is a really powerful tool and if you want to learn more about all the other features in it I highly recommend to check out our InDesign CC masterclass course which literally covers everything you need to know to be able to work with this tool like a professional let us know in the comments section what would you like us to cover next time on this series click on the link in the description or the join button to become a member if you want to work on future projects with us and see the whole design or illustration process live thanks a lot for watching like and share this video if you enjoyed it have fun learning guys and I will see you in the neck [Music] you

Channel: Yes I'm a Designer

Views: 118,047

Keywords: ULTIMATE GUIDE to MASKING in InDesign CC 2019, masking indesign, indesign, indesign tutorial, Frames, Elliptical frame, Gridify, Pen Tool, Pencil Tool, Smooth Tool, Image inside text, Feathering, Detect Edges, Text Wrap, Alpha Channel, Photoshop Path, Out of bounds, adobe indesign, adobe indesign tutorial, gridify indesign

Id: cC3i4X66z2I

Length: 24min 27sec (1467 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2019